Game Boy Camera & Printer: The Weirdest Peripherals Ever

Game Boy Camera & Printer: The Weirdest Peripherals Ever

Let's be honest for a second. When you picture the Game Boy, you picture Tetris. You picture Pokémon. You picture a grey brick and a green screen and a d-pad that's been worn smooth by a million hours of play. You do not picture a camera. And yet, in 1998, Nintendo strapped a camera to the Game Boy and it was somehow one of the most delightful, most bizarre, most ahead-of-its-time things the company ever made.

The Game Boy Camera and its partner in crime, the Game Boy Printer, are the weirdest peripherals Nintendo ever shipped. And I say that with nothing but love.

A camera that took photos in 2-bit grey

Here's the thing that still blows my mind about the Game Boy Camera: it took real photographs. Not drawings, not pixel art you made yourself — actual photos, captured through a tiny lens, rendered in the Game Boy's four shades of grey. The resolution was a staggering 128×112 pixels. That's 14,336 pixels total. A modern phone camera captures more than a hundred times that in a single frame.

And you know what? It didn't matter. Because the Game Boy Camera wasn't about taking good photos. It was about taking fun photos. It came with a suite of built-in games and tools — a little face-morphing editor, a stamp mode, a photo album, even a version of the classic game Ball. You could take a picture of your friend, then stretch their face into a horrifying cartoon and print it out. It was the closest thing to a meme machine that 1998 had ever seen.

The printer that printed on thermal paper

And then there was the Game Boy Printer. A tiny thermal printer that connected to the Game Boy Camera and spat out your photos on little strips of sticky-backed paper. The quality was, to put it kindly, not great. The images came out as grainy, low-contrast smudges that looked like they'd been faxed from 1985. But that was kind of the point. You'd take a photo, print it, and stick it on your school binder or your bedroom wall. It was instant photography for a generation that had never seen a Polaroid.

The printer was also, weirdly, used by a handful of games. Pokémon Yellow let you print out your Pokédex entries. The Pokémon Stadium games on N64 could print certificates. It was a gimmick, sure, but it was a gimmick that made the whole thing feel like a complete little ecosystem. You weren't just playing a game — you were making something.

The camera that was decades ahead of its time

Here's the part that makes the Game Boy Camera feel almost prophetic: it was doing things in 1998 that wouldn't become mainstream for another decade. Face filters? The Game Boy Camera had them, a full decade before Snapchat. Photo editing and stamps? Same. Sharing your photos with friends? The camera had a link cable mode that let you trade pictures, and you could even email them to a computer with the right adapter. It was social media before social media existed, rendered in four shades of grey and printed on thermal paper.

The Game Boy Camera even had a secret: a hidden developer mode that let you take photos at a higher resolution and access a bunch of hidden tools. It was the kind of Easter egg that made the whole thing feel like it was made by people who genuinely loved what they were doing.

Why we still love it

The Game Boy Camera and Printer are, objectively, terrible pieces of technology. The photos are awful. The printer is slow and the paper is expensive. The whole thing is a gimmick that Nintendo abandoned after a couple of years. And yet, collectors still hunt them down, and the camera in particular has become a cult favourite. There's a whole community of people who still shoot with the Game Boy Camera, who love the lo-fi aesthetic, who think a 128×112 photo of a friend's face stretched into a cartoon is the height of art.

And honestly? They're right. The Game Boy Camera wasn't about taking good photos. It was about having fun with your friends, about making something silly and sharing it, about the joy of instant creation. In that sense, it was one of the most successful peripherals Nintendo ever made. It just took us twenty years to realise it.

So next time you see a Game Boy Camera at a retro shop, don't walk past it. Pick it up. Take a terrible photo of your friend. Print it out and stick it somewhere. You'll understand.

Do you still have your Game Boy Camera? What's the worst photo you ever took with it? Tell us in the comments — we want to see it.